(a) Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to pill cutters, and particularly to a safe tablet cutting device provided with a suspension body with an opening through which a cutter may run, thereby preventing a user from being cut.
(b) Description of the Prior Art
Generally, to effectively carry tablets for easy taking, tablets are placed in a tablet box.
However, a conventional tablet box is merely a box. An accommodation space is formed inside the box, where the tablets are placed. However, the tablets often have to be taken according to a specific dosage, and sometimes some tablets cannot be taken as a whole. These tablets must be divided and taken only one half or even one quarter of them by means of cutting or splitting for the required dosage per meal or per day. Thus, when the user needs to divide the tablet, the tablet will be likely to be contaminated by his or her unclean hands, thereby making the user not feel good or compromising the effect or quality of the tablets. Further, if the user cut the tablet by using an external cutter and the cutter is improperly operated, the tablet may easily fall to the ground, or the user might cut his or her finger(s) if the user is careless or neglectful.
In this way, in order to avoid the above shortcomings, there have been tablet boxes introduced in the market to help the user cut the tablets. However, these conventional tablet boxes are provided with an exposed cutter and the majority of the users using them is the elderly; thus, they often cut their finger(s) due to poor eyesight or their obtuse action.
Thus, to solve the drawbacks mentioned above, U.S. Pat. No. 8,474,674 B2, titled Tablet Cutter, and US Publication No. US20070228053 A1, titled Pill Box and Splitter with Blade Guard, are disclosed. According to their teachings, a plate may be slid in the tablet box along sliding rails and the plate may hide a cutter when the tablet box is open. However, friction between the plate and the sliding rail may cause wear and operation difficulty. In addition, the cutter is isolated by a flexible piece, and the flexibility of the piece may suffer fatigue after a period of time, resulting in ineffective isolation to the cutter. Therefore, there is still room for improvement for the above teachings.
On the other hand, U.S. Pat. No. 7,243,826 B2 titled Pill Box and Splitter with Blade Guard has a movable blade guard that is prone to damage. U.S. Pat. No. 6,557,945 B1 title Tablet Cutter raises a blade from one end so that the other end of the blade descends to cut a pill. The blade may become loose and its cutting capability is reduced.